Marissa Mayer Is Working On A Revolutionary Change To Yahoo.com, And Sources Say It Might Look Like This

Sources say Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is, at this very moment, working on a major overhaul of the Yahoo homepage.

One source familiar with the product roadmap says this new homepage is not going to come out any time soon, and that Mayer has not yet even made some very basic decisions. This source points out that Mayer has only been at the company nine weeks and she just had a baby boy.

Another source, formerly at the company, but still close with many people there, says Mayer has some broad strokes in mind.

This source says that Mayer intends the homepage to be more Google-like and Facebook-like:

It would be Google-like in the sense that users will go there in order to find links that will take them somewhere else. The hope is that they will come back for more.

It would be Facebook-like in that it might prominently feature a "News Feed," an element of Web design that has become a staple of modern Web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Quora.

This source says this page would feature social content, feeds from content sites around the Internet, and have an open API for developers who want to write apps for Yahoo's 170 million daily active users.

Mayer's plan is to make the Yahoo.com homepage a "platform."

This source says these concepts are both exciting and controversial to current Yahoo executives.

They are exciting because everyone recognizes the page needs modernization. They are controversial because Yahoo currently uses the homepage to link to its own products, making them revenue winners even if they would not be on their own. If the Yahoo homepage starts linking out more, revenues will go down in the short term. The risk is that money might never come back.

Making this call is a big one for Mayer, and our other source says she has not done so yet, and that it would be seriously premature to say she has.

This source told us that trying to figure out exactly what the page will look like now would be like making a rendering of the rumored Apple TV.

We love renderings of future Apple products.

So we built the following mock-up, based on what we've heard people at Yahoo believe the page will look like.